I'm trying to build a rig for myself too. My budget (minus a monitor) is a little under $2,000USD. Where I am for overclocking, you may want to rethink or downgrade some of the fans, etc...but maybe not, if you ever do decide to overclock. For nothing else, cold=good. It's not the best, but pretty competitive....I think. Here goes:

I also left out the DVDR drive, cus I'm still not sure about that. All-in-all, that'll run you approximately, $2,000USD-ish. I hope this helps. If thats more than youre looking for I'd skimp on the vid card, maybe the 8800GTS 320MB might serve you well, as well as maybe skimping on the Mobo a bit. Another thing you could downgrade is the RAM to DDR2 800.

Anyways, that's my 2 cents, I'd be interested to see what people have to say about my potential build. Hope this helps...

Since you ain't ocing, any DDR2 8000 Should do the trick, no point spending $100 for just slightly faster memory.

Video card, your gonna want a DX10 card so 8800GTS should do the trick. A slightly lower downgrade is the 8600GTS which in my books is pretty good. It performs almost the same as the 7900GS good for today's gaming and even better when Dx10 games come out